Video: Creating the gradebook layout

Before we get started adding content and functionality to our grade book, we need to go ahead and give it some structure. In order to see the grade book a little easier, the first thing I'm going to do is go ahead and change my view down to about 75%. Clicking on the Zoom tab, I can come over here and make sure I'm at 75 and click OK. I can now see a little bit more of the space I have to work with. Now my grade book needs to have a place for a students' first name, last name, grade and a spot for the assignment name. Which means that my first assignment isn't actually going to start until I get to column E.

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Creating the gradebook layout

Before we get started adding content and functionality to our gradebook, we need to go ahead and give it some structure.In order to see the grade book a little easier, the first thingI'm going to do is go ahead and change my view down to about 75%.Clicking on the Zoom tab, I can come over here and make sure I'm at 75 and click OK.I can now see a little bit more of the space I have to work with.Now my grade book needs to have a place fora students' first name, last name, grade and a spotfor the assignment name.Which means that my first assignment isn't actuallygoing to start until I get to column E.

If I'd like space for 30 assignments, that means thatmy grade book needs to be at least 34 columns wide.Furthermore, because there's three spaces that'll be taken upin the header and I would like to have roomfor 30 students, I need to end up witha grid that's going to be 34 wide by 33 tall.I'm going to go ahead and place my cursor inthe first cell and just start dragging that grid out.I'm going to go ahead and drag all the way to the right until I reach 34.Right next to my cursor, I can see a little indicator that I am now at34, that's column and I'm going to go aheadand drag straight down until I reach 33.

There it is.I've now outlined the basics of my grade book.To make sure I can continue to see theworkable space, I'm going to add some borders to this.I'm going to go ahead and go back to Home.I'm going to go to the Border icon and select All Borders.There we are. So far,we've got the basic layout done.Now we said that we need to have a place for thestudents' First name, Last name, Grade, as well as the Assignment name.And then underneath the Assignment name, we probably want tohave space for Total Points and the Type of Assignment.

Right away, you can see that First, Last, andGrade are at the top of the grade book.I need to make sure that those end up directlydown here right above where the name is going to be entered.To do this, I'm going to merge those cellsby clicking and highlighting those three cells, I can thenclick on merge in center and it will automatically centerthose titles and drop them down to the appropriate places.Now, right where it says Assignment Name, it would be really hard to typein these tiny little boxes all theassignments we're going to do for this course.So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and grab between the oneand two rows and I'm just going to drag this down to about, let's say, 100 pixels.

Looks good. There we go.Now unfortunately, look at Assignment Name,it still overlaps into the second cell.To change this, we're actually going to change the orientation of the text.I'm going to goahead and click in the first assignment cell and drag all the wayto the end of our grade book which should be There it is.I'm going to come up to Format Cells, and I'm going togo all the way down and click on the Format Cells icon.Here, I'm going to click on the Alignment tab.And I'm going to go ahead and change this alignmentall the way up to a 75-degree angle and click OK.

You'll now notice that our grade book lookssomewhat similar to those charts you can buy andhang in your classroom for tracking student data.What you'll also notice is thatunfortunately, only the first cell shows angled.That's because the rest of these cells don't have any content yet.Doing something as simple as putting a period will actually give that cellsome content where all of a sudden, it will show up angled as well.Now, while some of you won't mind yourcells not being angled until you type the assignmentin, if for some of you, you find itfrustrating they don't look the correct way right away.You can just copy that period youplaced in the first cell, pace it across to the rest of these cells.

And right away, our grade book starts to take shape withthe angled section for the assignment name, a points column, atype column, a place for the student grade to go, aplace for their first name, and their last name to show up.At this point, our grade book has some basic structureto it and it's time to start adding some functionality.

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